Despite $50,000 in daily revenue, developer said he “cannot take” the attention.

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Thus far, we have yet to write anything about the mobile gaming phenomenon that is Flappy Bird. That’s mostly because we haven't had much to say about it: as a game, the tap-to-fly-between-the-pipes gameplay is almost insultingly simple and uninteresting. The only curious things about the free-to-download game, really, were its sudden and meteoric rise to the top of the Android and iOS app charts in the last few weeks and what that popularity says about our collective taste in games. Ian Bogost covered this ground so well over at The Atlantic, though, that anything else on the subject would just be a waste of time and energy.

But Flappy Bird became a little more interesting this afternoon when the game was pulled down from the iOS and Android App Stores, apparently at the request of Vietnamese creator Dong Nguyen. The millions who have downloaded the game so far will still be able to play it, of course, but anyone who missed out on the phenomenon during the week or two of its unexpected success (or the few months previous, when it languished on app stores largely unloved) is out of luck.

What Nguyen “cannot take” isn’t the reported $50,000 in daily revenueFlappy Bird was bringing in, but rather the attention the game’s success has brought. “I can call Flappy Bird is [sic] a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it,” Nguyen tweeted yesterday. “Yes, the #1 makes a lot of visibility, more profits and also getting more haters :-(“ he tweeted earlier in the week.

Many of those haters have attacked Nguyen for making so much money from a game they see as simplistic and unoriginal. The game’s general design has heavy similarities to a number of largely unknown casual games from the past, though it’s important to note that it’s not identical to any of these likely inspirations. Kotaku was among many to note how the game’s art is extremely similar to Nintendo’s Mario games, though the art assets don’t seem to be ripped directly from any copyrighted works. Nguyen has denied any suggestion that there were any legal issues behind the game’s removal.

Others have suggested that the sudden success of Flappy Bird and other games by Nguyen was driven by fake reviews and bot-powered downloads, rather than any organic viral spread. And of course, being a prominent person on the Internet, Nguyen also attracted his fair share of death threats and other undue abuse from trolls both before and after the removal was announced.

Despite all this, Nguyen has kept up a busy conversation on his Twitter account with fans and haters alike, but says he has been “overloaded” with requests for formal interviews from the press, most of which he has turned down. “I am sorry press people. You are not my players!” he tweeted in explanation. Thus, Nguyen's tweets are the best window we have into his thoughts amid his game's meteoric and unexpected success. Those tweets show him expressing concern that people are “overusing” the game, suggesting that he is being “misjudged,” and explaining a lack of game updates by saying cryptically “a lot of things [are] happen[ing] to me right now.”

It all suggests a man who's ready to take a step back from a limelight he never sought or had any reason to expect. Still, in his last tweet as of this writing, Nguyen vowed that he will “still make games.”

While Flappy Bird may be gone, an army of overt clones has already developed to take its place, latching on to the original’s unlikely success like so many bottom-feeding leeches. The excellent I Want a Clone tumblr has been tracking some ofthe moreegregiousexamples of developers offering to buy and/or sell direct copies of the game to make a quick buck. Going by Nguyen’s example, those cloners may want to be careful what they wish for…

[Update (Feb. 10): Speaking of clones, since this story was first published, a game called Fly Birdie - Flappy Bird Flyer has skyrocketed to No. 2 on the worldwide iTunes free app charts. Another clone named Flappy Bee is currently ranked fifth on that chart.]

I'm the sole developer (in a 2-man team) of a barely successful Mac/PC game in a very small niche. It makes about $1k/month. Several times a month, I want to make it free so that I can tone down what users expect from me. If it wasn't a 2-man team, it would've happened before we even hit $500 in revenue. Whenever there's a bad review, it hurts. Whenever a user can't get it to work (whether due to their unfamiliarity with the equipment required or my mistakes), I feel it personally. If a multiplayer server goes down, even just for 15-30 minutes, it'll ruin my day. Next fall (the interest in the game is very seasonal), it'll likely be even more popular.

I can't imagine handling that at flappy-bird scale. He probably has hundreds or thousands of people telling him his game sucks and he sucks (most likely due to their own crappy phones or bad playing skills) every day.

To the guy saying: "well you shouldn't put it out there if you can't take it": Do you want the only people to develop software to be robots? How about this: don't be an asshole. The guy wrote some software that happened to be successful. He's still a human being. If it was at <500 installs, you'd probably treat him nicely (as people did when my game was small). Why should that change if it is at 10,000,000 installs?

tl,dr: The sheer number of user requests and (sometimes undeserved) bad reviews when developing software as a 1-man team makes me fully understand why a guy would pack up after banking 6 or more figures.

I've been an Ars reader for a decade but never felt compelled to comment until this story.

In the last two years I went from nothing to being a multi-millionaire because an app I created. Most of you have no idea the amount of bullshit successful app developers have to endure. My family and I get death threats on a weekly basis, and not from angry basement-dweller 16-year-old types. There are legitimate organized criminals and total psychopaths who hunt successful app developers because they're easy targets.

I've had people track down friends and family members on Facebook, then send me their private photos with threats of rape and murder.

Anyone calling this developer "weak" because he couldn't cope with that is a shitbag, and absolutely part of the problem with humanity. If you feel anything other than sympathy for this guy, go fuck yourself until dead.

Money isn't everything. In fact, it's nothing when your family is terrified and you can't leave the house because you're worried you'll be kidnapped for ransom or killed by a psycho.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl